Andrew G Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, stated during a college talk that Bitcoin would become as relevant as cash in the next 20-30 years. Not long ago Haldane had considered Bitcoin had no relevance. It seems he changed his perspective. He is not the only economist who turned from a Bitcoin agnostic to a Bitcoin believer. Many have changed their opinion as the price of Bitcoin rebound several times since 2018’s crash. A renowned economic historian, Niall Ferguson reported to the Australian Financial Review on March 6, 2019, that “I was very wrong. Wrong to think there was no use for a form of currency based on blockchain technology.” Nevertheless, there are also many sceptical economists such as Nouriel Roubini, who calls Bitcoin “a mother and a father of all scams.”

Last month the New York Attorney General’s office revealed that Bitfinex’s $850 million worth of fund has been lost through their payment processor called Crypto Capital. Bitfinex hid the loss of $850 million by taking funds from Tether’s reserve. Shortly after the news Bitfinex announced  their private token sale aiming to raise $1 billion to cover their frozen funds. Bitfinex was able to raise $1 billion in the form of Tether in just 10 days. The company didn’t reveal who invested in their native exchange token, whose full name is UNUS SED LEO. LEO token will officially start trading on Bitfinex from 20th of May. According to the whitepaper of LEO token, Bitfinex will use 95% of the funds recovered from Crypto Capital to repurchase and burn LEO tokens. LEO token holders will benefit from reduced fees on the exchange.

Microsoft announced that it is building a Decentralized Identity (DID) tool on the Bitcoin blockchain. Today our email addresses and user names are given to us by companies who can take them away whenever they want. Microsoft wants to enable people to own and control their digital identity. By empowering users with a new identity system, Microsoft plans to make money in new ways with services on top of DID. Microsoft’s DID open source project is called ION (Identity Overlay Network). ION is a software based on a protocol called Sidetree, that is designed to run as a second layer on any blockchain, meaning the data is stored and accessed off chain. The ION network is now available on Bitcoin’s testnet.